


Best Laid Schemes

by Shoshanna Gold (shoshannagold)



Category: Good Wife (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-22
Updated: 2009-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:38:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoshannagold/pseuds/Shoshanna%20Gold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Happy Yuletide, Celli! Thanks so much to Perpetual Motion for the beta job and hand-holding.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Best Laid Schemes

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, Celli! Thanks so much to Perpetual Motion for the beta job and hand-holding.

If you were an Agos, you were a lawyer. It wasn't a commandment; those were open to interpretation. It was immutable: the sky was blue, the Yankees were Satan's disciplines, and Agos' were lawyers.

For the first twenty-four years of his life, Cary accepted that his path had been set at conception. It didn't occur to him that he might do something different. He never went through the kinds of phases his friends had: when he was six, he didn't want to be a fireman; when he was nine, he didn't want to be a Navy Seal; when he was fourteen, he didn't want to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. He was going to be a lawyer, like his mother and his father and his siblings. Like his cousins, and his uncles and his aunts – the ones who still worked, not the ones who went out for lunch and fucked their tennis pros – and his grandfathers. His great-grandmother had been the first woman to make partner at a Boston law firm. She was one hell of a woman. She'd loved the law.

That was the second immutable rule: if you were an Agos, you loved the law. Torts excited you; you wrote briefs passionately; you lived for court dates, if you were a trial lawyer, or litigation, if you were corporate. Cary had a second cousin who was a tax lawyer for the IRS; she spent eighty hours a week chasing down corporations who had failed to file the right form or lied on the forms they had filed, and she was honestly the happiest person he knew.

So it had been a complete shock to Cary when he'd realized, after his first semester at Harvard Law, that he could take it or leave it.

Another guy who experienced an epiphany of such earth-shattering magnitude might have dropped out of law school. He might have taken off a semester to explore other possibilities, like organic farming or NASCAR. He might have dropped out entirely and taken up bikram yoga or biked across Africa. Joined the Marines. Sailed around the world. Or something less extreme, but still rebellious, like flunked a class or two or transferred from the law school to the English department and devoted his days to three lines in 'Ode to a Grecian Urn.'

Cary didn't do any of those things. He considered them, some of them more seriously than others. He loved sailing and a year of risking his life sailing from Cape Cod to Australia might put a whole new perspective on the whole law thing. But he'd spent his whole damn life trying to get into Harvard Law, and he wasn't going to throw away years of debate society, soup kitchens, and a year in Belize with the Peace Corps because of an existential crisis.

He stayed in law school. He made Dean's List every term, published in _Law Review_ at the end of his first year, and was editor by his third year. His team took third place in the Williston Contracts Negotiation competition, his crew team won the cup two out of three years he skipped, and he'd lined up an articling position with the Massachusetts State Supreme Court for after he graduated (_summa cum laude_). And he brought his boyfriend home for Christmas dinner every year.

The first year he didn't even tell them who he was coming home with him, just that it was somebody important to him. His family was gracious to Lucas, as he'd known they'd be. Overall, they reacted to him being gay with equanimity. Not only were they Boston Democrats and card-carrying members of the ACLU, his father had drafted gay rights legislation and his mother had served as counsel for ACT UP in the eighties in the fight to fast-track AIDS drugs. Anything less than complete acceptance of his sexuality would have been hypocritical, and more importantly to them, unjust. They never knew about the deal Cary negotiated with himself, one day in the middle of a massively boring lecture on international tax policy, the upshot of which was that he got to have at least one thing in his life that he loved.

It was settling, and he damn well knew it. It might have been worse if he wasn't any good at law, if he'd had to struggle for every grade and still only place in the middle of his class. But the real bitch of it was that he was _good_ at law. He thought that would be enough: a job where he did okay, made decent coin, and at the end of the day, got to go home to a nice guy who would put his arms around Cary and make him forget that he spent sixty hours a week deposing contestants in class action suits.

And then it all went to shit.

Over the course of his law degree, Cary attended something like a hundred guest lectures. Probably more. HLS was intent on providing him with a well-rounded perspective on the law and its many nuances, and regular faculty often brought in visiting speakers, men and women who were exceptional lawyers and legal scholars. Cary went to the lectures, he took notes, and if he thought that the speaker might be worth making an impression on, he'd ask an intelligent question or two. It was all part of the greater plan.

What was it that guy – Burns – said, about the best laid plans, and how they always went astray. Actually, Cary knew that wasn't the real quote – he'd aced English 305. But who the hell used the word 'a-gley' in this day and age?

Anyway, one fine spring day in Cary's last year of law school, Will Gardner gave a guest lecture in Cary's litigation seminar. And for the first time in what had been a heinously long three years, Cary couldn't look away from somebody talking about the law.

It wasn't even like Will's topic – a class action suit defending a toy manufacturer – was all that compelling. It wasn't that Will spoke with a particular passion or conviction – you didn't get invited to speak at Harvard Law School if you were the type to read from cue cards. It was that Will seemed to be enjoying every moment. Like the law was fun. Fun!

There were a lot of things Cary knew the law to be, and fun had never factored into any of them. It was essential; it was the backbone of civilized society, it was the cornerstone of truth, justice, and the American way – but it wasn't fun. Will Gardner made Cary forget all of that for fifty minutes – fifty minutes that passed like five. Cary was so entranced by the smirk on Will's face as he talked about the utility of a good stall tactic that he couldn't even think of a question to ask – the first time in his life that he wanted to make a good impression and failed.

He blew off a date after class, taking his laptop to the library so he could look up Will instead. Stern, Lockhart, and Gardner wasn't the biggest firm in Chicago, nor were they the ones that paid the most. Jonas Stern had been a radical civil rights lawyer in the '70s, and in the '80s had brought on Christine Lockhart to help him build a corporate law firm that billed millions of dollars annually.

Will had made partner five years ago, and the firm added family law and criminal defense departments. Cary looked up every single lawyer they'd hired: they tended to recruit locally, out of Northwestern and the University of Chicago, with an occasional exception made for a Georgetown grad– it was almost like they avoided the Ivys.

Cary knew that he was going to be a first-round draft pick after he passed the bar. Firms in Boston and New York were going to vie for him, and he'd already had drinks with the recruiter from the Manhattan's DA office. But none of them had offered him anything new, anything exciting. Anything _fun_. The law was the law was the law – or so he'd thought until he met Will Gardner.

He closed his laptop and thought about the look on Will's face when one Cary's more over-eager classmates – showing off her background research – had asked him about the differences between playing in the minor leagues and being a lawyer – to which Will had winked and replied that at least in baseball, he'd get three strikes before he was kicked off the plate; judges offered no such guarantees. He'd grinned boyishly, and Cary, sitting ten rows away, had felt himself grinning back. In what was really no time at all, Will had made Cary want _more_. For the first time, he could see how his professional life could be as satisfying as his personal life.

One of his most closely guarded secrets was that though he didn't love the law, he wanted to. He wanted to feel it as part of himself, to win cases because juries sensed that his convictions were so deeply held he couldn't be wrong. He wanted to be an Agos, to the fullest extent of what that meant, and he thought the secret to achieving that might be in Chicago, in Will Gardner's law firm, and maybe, if Cary was sufficiently persuasive, in his bed.

 

_ The best laid schemes o' mice an' men  
gang aft a-gley._ \- Robert Burns ("To a Mouse")


End file.
